Purge – Updated

I’m moving.

And, as a result, I’m sorting though a lifetime of geek detritus, and getting rid of almost all of it. Of everything I have, I’m keeping an Indy, some SCSI bits, an unnamed beige x86 and Grayswandir and Werewindle, my laptops. And I’m getting rid of the rest of my crap.

And there’s a lot of crap here. Jesus. How many printer cables could I possibly, ever have used? Why do I have so many? And what the hell is all the rest of this crap? Why did I ever need this many VGA extensions? So I could put a monitor on the roof?

Christ, I don’t even know what half of this stuff does. I’ve got:

A six-foot cable that seems to be SCSI-2 at one end and some kind of angry metal porcupine at the other. Christ, 8-bit DB-50. How retro is that?

A twenty foot cable that’s RJ-45 at one end and RJ-11 at the other. I have no idea what this does.

Phonenet. Boy, lots of phonenet. A lot of other wierd, wierd localtalk cables.

A Mac SE that’s going to the curb.

A bunch of keyboards that are doing the same.

Parallel cables, legions of parallel cables. I wonder what they were for.

How many printer cables can one man ever, ever possibly have needed? Where did they all come from?

What’s this MIDI-to-RCA/LRV cable for? Do I need both of them?

Laptop bags. Where did all these laptop bags come from? I don’t own that many laptops.

Pizza-box Sun 4Cs. Why, I don’t know. Out you go…

A dual-processor P-100 motherboard. Woo. Just what I don’t need.

Keyboards, my God the keyboards…

Anyone who wants any of this shit is welcome to it. I don’t know where half of this shit came from, and I don’t care where any of it goes. To paraphrase a friend of mine, I’m sure I’ll miss some of this stuff, but I’d miss the space it would have taken up more.

Update: I’ve got some more stuff.

A Linksys phoneline-router, and some related cards. Needs a power supply, but free to a good home.

A Dell Latitude C/Dock II, which doesn’t work As Suggested It Might with my Insprion 3800, even though it is exactly the right form factor and slides right in there, because you crippled it on purpose, you fucks, not that I’m bitter.

A raft of Coax that’s going to the curb.

A battery for a Dell Latitude, P/N 3149C rating
14.4v, 1300mAh, which I’d like a few bucks for. But not many.

A USR 14.4 external modem.

A full-height tower. Just the case, no PS, but whoever wants it can have it.

An old Celeron 450 cpu+mobo. Take it away.

A Phillips Velo PDA. Old, very old. Still works, though.

An Alextel box, the dumbest of the dumb terminals. Still works. Take it away!

Kev has called dibs on the Mac, and Kev, it’s bagged and ready for you to pick up. Mark, I’ve got you laptop bag, I think you’ll like it. Anyone else… well, get moving.

This entry was written by mhoye, posted on August 12, 2004 at 9:05 am, filed under digital. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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17 Comments

If you think this move will lighten things for you, try limiting yourself to what you can take on one plane flight. 35kg plus one carryon. I left a lot of stuff behind, particularly at Chris and Darcy’s, but it felt great. Unpacking took twenty minutes. And I wound up taking 95% clothes, some of which I still haven’t worn. Sometimes I think about how much detritus had accumulated as a result of my existance and how it would look just before being set alight. That’s a big fucking bonfire, and I’m not including daily garbage that I’ve already disposed of; I can’t think that big.

Hah! I can beat that. I have something that you can plug the 50 pin SCSI cable into… heck, I have two things! (and they are both non-organic).

The RJ-11 -> RJ-45 cable should be an ISDN cable. A number of the earlier Gandalf and… crap, can’t remember the name of the company that made all the routers that kicked ass, and even Courier used them with their products because a lot of the american telcos wired ISDN with rj-11 at the jack. Silliness.

Do not put the Mac SE on the curb. If it works, give it to me. If it doesn’t, give it to me anyway and I’ll turn it into a fishtank.

The MIDI-RCA cable is most likely a DIN cable for a Commodore product to hook it up to a monitor, or a video cable from a Sega Genesis or something similar (I have a couple of them).

Ok, that’s enough of playing “identify Mike’s shit” – I have surpassed the level of geekiness I am comfortable with.

You can take heart that there are other people out there with similar afflictions. I am sad to say I give kj a run for his money, but refuse to get into it here.

Cool stash Mike, and good on ya to get rid of it. I’m serious about the SE, tho.

Gentlemen, all these things can be arranged. Tom, it’s a deal. I’ll throw in a second mobo for free, because I think one of them might be a little dodgy. As for the rest, I’m heading out of town this evening, but if you want to come and pick them up I’ll make sure they’re available. E-mail me if you’d like to pick up anything tonight.

I’m currently, but not for long, at 24 Melgund Ave, in the Glebe near Bank & Fifth.

Anyone who’s claimed something can pick it up tonight or tomorrow. Knock on the front door at the given address, on the side if nobody answers. It’s probably better to call ahead. E-mail me if you’ve got any other questions.